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Working Out Chords

a.k.a. When Good Charts Go Bad!By Warren SirotaThere are a lot of bad charts out there. When I was a teenager, the "urban semimyth" that circulated among the local garage bands was that all the wrongchords in the charts that we bought were put there deliberately, to avoidviolating some obscure principal of copyright law (the "if you change a note, itsnot copyright violation" theory. Hey, we were teenagers!) Anyway, we didntseem to grasp the fact that the authorized publishers of a song can hardly beguilty of copyright violation.But I digress. Charts that are close but have some questionable spots are notonly found in legitimate published sheet music, but also (no surprise) inunauthorized collections of songs and also in the charts that musicians make foreach other.So how do you correct a problematic chart? You get one or more great recordingsof the song in question and listen to what they did there. Then you decidewhether or not you want to do the same thing.Its pretty easy to work out chords if you have any tool that facilitates repeatinga section of music over and over again. This might be an A-B repeat switch on aCD player, an looping tool in an audio editing or playback program, or a tooldesigned expressly for this type of purpose. I am the author of such a tool,SlowGold, and I will use that to illustrate the technique, but the generalprinciples apply regardless of what tool you use.Working out harmonies from recordings usually consists of several steps:1. Figure out what the bass is doing2. Transcribe the melody notes3. Use logic to narrow the possible chords and trial-and-error todiscover the correct onesCase StudyI will give a jazz example, but the technique applies equally well to many otherforms of music.Felicidade is a great samba by the late Antonio Carlos Jobim, Brazils mostpopular musical export. It was featured in the classic film, Black Orpheus, andhas become a standard played frequently by jazz artists the world over.

It also has a very unusual form, as it doesnt follow the AABA structure commonto so many songs. In fact, there are no repeated sections. The only repetition isa motif of descending half-notes that appears twice, effectively marking off thetwo halves of the song.I was lucky to have a pretty decent chart to start with. But a few of the chordchoices didnt quite work for me, and I wanted to see if I could do better, since Ilike to play the tune fairly often at the gigs.So I sat down with two excellent recordings Joe Hendersons recording fromDouble Rainbow, with Elaine Elias, Oscar Castro-Neves, Nico Assumpcao andPaulo Braga, and Astrud Gilbertos recording from the classic Look To TheRainbow. The Henderson recording is a modern take, and the Gilberto cutfortunately escaped the cheesy organ that mars several songs on that record. Infact, Gilbertos recording has some rather muscular and appealing percussionpropelling it.The first thing I discovered, naturally, was that the two recordings were indifferent keys than each other, which were different still from the chart that Ihad, so some transposition was going to be involved when mentally shiftingmodes between the songs. But, since I had already taken the time to input mychart for the tune into a notation file (my handwritten notation is really hard toread), it was easy to print out versions in each of the keys to work with.The next thing I noticed was that Henderson repeated the first 8 bars, whereasGilberto didnt (and neither did my chart). When that happens, you have toconsult your own judgement. I kind of liked Hendersons approach thetransition to the second phrase has always seemed a little abrupt to me, and thisseems to ameliorate that effect. Bottoms Up!The first thing to do when working out chords is to boost the bass. More oftenthan not, the bass will be playing the roots of the songs chords, at least on thefirst beat of the measure. This helps, because it can be a little hard todiscriminate bass pitches. If necessary, use a looping tool to play a single fullbass note over and over again, and grope for notes on your instrument until youfind the bass note.About groping for notes it doesnt sound dignified, and you cant be proud of itlike you can instant pitch recognition, but how do you think you develop betterpitch recognition? By practicing it like this.As you play various notes on your instrument against a repeating chord or note,you will identify some notes as being clearly dissonant with what is played, somethat are clearly in the chord, some that seem consonant with the chord but addsomething to the flavor (these would be chord extensions). Hopefully, you willidentify the bass note. Perhaps in the process youll identify other notes that arebeing played.An overall, "common sense" listen serves to clarify the arrangement. How manyinstruments are playing? What is each one doing? In Hendersons arrangement,

the somewhat extended intro is played by bass, sparse drums and guitar.Henderson enters on horn for the melody, while the piano craftily sneaks inhalfway through the head.The intro looks like this:

(click here to listen)

How do you put chord symbols over these notes? Well, the strongest indication isthe first bass note of the 2-bar repeated phrase. Its an A. With that strong bassnote, you know its some "flavor" of A which basically means Am, Amaj, A7, A+or A diminished (most of the other "flavors" of chords, like 11ths, 13ths, etc. areessentially variations of 7th chords). You can immediately eliminate A+, if youknow the strong characteristic taste of an augmented scale, and A diminished,since diminished chords are just about always passing chords no-one ever sitsfor eight measures on a diminished chord.But if you listen to the guitar part, you find it alternates between two pair ofopen strings the G/B pair, and the B/E pair. Now the note E is part of all 3chord candidates. G is the 7th of A, and is part of either an Am7 or A7 chord, butis not consistent with any form of A major chord. So major chords are out. Also,B is the 9th of either an Am or A major scale, so, on the evidence of the firstguitar and bass notes, the chord is either an Am9 or an A9. If the feel of the songdoesnt tell you immediately that the chord is Am9, the 2nd bass note, C, will. Cis part of Am9 but not A9.So here you have 2 measures of static harmony, Am9. You could write it eitheras:| Am9 | Am9 |or, more accurately (including the bass) as:| Am9 Am9/C | Am9/D Am9/E |At the beginning of that 2nd measure, the bass note is a D. Its one of thosefairly unusual cases where the bass note on beat one is not only not the tonic,but is not even really in the chord. You can view Am9/D as a suspended chord(one where the 4th replaces the 3rd) with the 4th in the bass.

The chord and bass pattern of Hendersons intro occurs at several other sectionsof the song where the harmony is essentially a static Am for a couple ofmeasures. It a less-cliched substitute for the | Am Am/maj7 | Am7 Am/maj7 |that you often find in bossas (and jazz as well).The same chords and bass line constitute the first two measures of the head.The Gilberto version also employs a very similar motion at this point, so maybeits safe to consider that as part of the song rather than an idosyncraticarranging trick. In measure 3 of the head, they diverge. You can very clearlyhear the bass in Hendersons recording going from C to G, meaning that the songhas gone from Am to the relative major key, C major (the B that was the 9 in theAm9 is now the major 7 in a C major 7 chord) . It adds a distinctive lilt that isvery appealing.General Principles of DeductionUsually, you can get pretty far by knowing the bass note and melody note at anygiven time (if theyre different, anyway. If theyre the same, they dont give youmuch information). Its almost often enough to analyze the chords at beats 1 and3; rarely do chords change in between those beats.If you assume that the bass note is either the root, major or minor third, or fifthof the chord, youll see that all the likely chords are based on C, Ab, A or F.Heres a table that shows you the chords to try for any bass/melody combinationwhere the bass is C. You can transpose this principle readily to other keys.BassNote

MelodyNote

Implied Chord(s) in order of

likeliness

C#/Db

C7b9

C Maj or C7

D#/Eb

Cm, C7#9

C7sus4, F/C

F#/Gb

C7b5, C dim, G#7

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